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Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

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Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#71

Post by recursive »

jeffbee wrote: post #26
skybrian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sweeping a lot of problems under the rug. Many US governments are so disfunctional that it's unclear that they could succeed at European-style public housing. An analogy: just because Japan has a very good high-speed rail network doesn't imply that a new one will succeed in the US. In California it's an open question whether it's going to succeed in the end. You can't assume the US way of doing things like th…

California has a vast and robust sprawling network of socialized transportation, the budget for which has doubled in the past 2 years to consume 7% of the annual state budget. Think I am talking about high speed rail? No, just the freeway department, which spends 40x more every year and the economic sustainability of which is never even obliquely questioned. In short, California has plenty of appetite for socialism,…

> 40x more every year

Am I reading this right? Are you saying that each decade, the California freeway department multiplies their budget by a quadrillion? If their budget was $1 in 2013, they would now be spending more money than there exists in the world? I'm going to request a source for that.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#73

Post by rayiner »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

> I don't understand. My understanding of why insulin is so expensive: intellectual property laws are enforced by the government preventing businesses without that intellectual property to compete in the space.

That’s not an accurate understanding of intellectual property specifically. Insulin isn’t like a pill, where once you have a chemical formula you can make millions of them very cheaply. It’s a biologic, an artificial hormone. Even leaving aside the patents, it’s very expensive to get approval for a generic biologic (called a biosimilar). That’s why there are few manufacturers of synthetic human insulin, even though that’s out of patent.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#74

Post by gamblor956 »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

Insulin pricing isn't entirely IP issue; it's been out of protection and available as a generic for many decades now.

The issue is that while insulin is actually quite cheap to make once you get started, the startup-costs associated with getting to that point are quite hefty: lab real estate, equipment to make and purify, FDA fees, etc.

Newer versions of insulin are "better" than generic insulin: easier to take, fewer side effects, etc. The major insulin producers have been slowly doling out minor improvements over time, about every decade or so, to maintain IP protection on these newer modern versions of insulin, and the high prices associated with these newer versions. They've also been paying off several generics manufacturers to delay them from manufacturing generic versions of these modern versions as the patents expire.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#75

Post by rayiner »

genderwhy wrote: post #60

This is great news. Honestly, I hope to see more nationalization of widely used services (or whatever the equivalent word for nationalization is at state or municipal levels.) Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases. A…

> Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases.

Where? The US has among the highest percentage of kids going to government owned and operated schools. We have plenty of government housing as well (projects). Nearly all of our roads and transit systems are publicly owned and operated too.

Almost uniformly, those government operated systems aren’t very good—in America. And it doesn’t have to do with “funding.” If you compare with Europe, we spend more money per student, per transit rider, and per public housing resident, etc.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#76

Post by olliej »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

You know developing insulin doesn't require violating patents, right? And the price of insulin in the US is entirely an artifact of monopoly behavior by a small number of pharmaceutical companies?

The ability to mass produce insulin at negligible cost has been around for decades, they guy who discovered it made it patent free even.

Only in the US do companies get away with this kind of price gouging, and only because of monopolistic (or I get oligopolistic?) behavior and BS legal threats against anyone that might impact their profiteering off the work of others (paying off competitors not to compete, and BS patents on minor changes, with applications carefully scattered to maximize length of coverage).

The only reason it's taking someone the size of CA to actually do something, is because the Pharma companies buy out, pay off, or lawyer into oblivion anyone else. All strategies that normally work because the victims of the (to me) clearly illegal monopoly based actions aren't incurring costs if they stop, whereas the gouging and monopoly tactics cost CA huge amounts annually. The only thing Pharma could do to make it worth CA not doing this would be to stop price gouging, which is of course the only reason CA is doing this.

That price gouging is illegal if it's some dude hoarding toilet paper, but not when it's insulin being sold by multi-billion dollar corporations remains absurd. That people come to defend the "IP rights" of these organizations and their BS patents is a really American phenomenon.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#77

Post by genderwhy »

ggreer wrote: post #56
genderwhy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"All these safety regulations slow down the free market! Anyone should be able to make and sell insulin! If it's poisonous, people just won't buy that!"

I mean… the FDA could drastically reduce the price of drugs and prevent shortages by allowing imports of medicines approved in the EU or Canada.

For sure, but also I don't want "Joe's Discount Basement Insulin" to be on the market. I do think we should allow imports of medicines from some places in the world as long as they meet a verifiable safety standard.

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#78

Post by m3kw9 »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

It’s only the modified versions that are protected and still only for 10 years, so the govt can choose a mod that has its patent expired

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#79

Post by [deleted] »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

[deleted]

Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own

#80

Post by cma »

gamblor956 wrote: post #74
r3trohack3r wrote: post #69

> Though insulin generally costs less than $10 per dose to produce, some versions of the drug have a list price above $200. This is in part because, in the US, a warped market has allowed three companies to dominate the insulin business. > With California leading the way, a handful of states are considering trying to disrupt the market for essential medications, starting with insulin. The plan would be to manufacture…

Insulin pricing isn't entirely IP issue; it's been out of protection and available as a generic for many decades now. The issue is that while insulin is actually quite cheap to make once you get started, the startup-costs associated with getting to that point are quite hefty: lab real estate, equipment to make and purify, FDA fees, etc. Newer versions of insulin are "better" than generic insulin: easier to take, fewe…

> They've also been paying off several generics manufacturers to delay them from manufacturing generic versions of these modern versions as the patents expire.

Isn't that already illegal (price fixing/collusion)? How are they structuring the deals to avoid prosecution?

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